Tennants as landlords
Max Egremont
BROKEN BLOOD by Simon Blow
Faber, £14.95
Last year Lord Glenconner gave a party for his 60th birthday. The celebra- tions took the form of a cruise through the West Indies and were centred upon the island of Mustique, much of which he owns. They were dignified by the presence of the rich, the aristocratic, the famous and several members of the royal family. Photographs later appeared in the colour supplement of a Sunday newspaper of the host and his guests dressed as if for one of the Sun King's more opulent fetes at Versailles. It was not the first time that Lord Glenconner's glittering progress had attracted the attention of the gossip wri- ters. Yet he is a vulnerable man, for whom the problems of the world can occasionally seem too much. Once, for instance, he had a nervous breakdown while driving to Scotland _which took the form of the belief that he was dissolving into gold-dust on the motorway.
Simon Blow describes the ancestry of this bird of brilliant plumage. For Lord Glenconner is a Tennant, the present head of the family no less. Originally from the Ayrshire farming stock, the Tennants achieved great riches in the early 19th century through the huge St Rollox bleaching and chemical works, the enor- mous chimney of which dominated the Glasgow skyline. Three successive genera- tions each produced an entrepreneur of exceptional skill. With the death of Sir Charles Tennant in 1906, this strain dimi- nished, only for talent to sow itself in other Ways. Sir Charles built Glen, a baronial mansion in the Scottish borders. Here his children, particularly his daughters, inha- bited a world far removed from the great factories of St Rollox. The girls were bright, in the sense that they seemed always to sparkle or gush, seldom to think or observe. Charity married Lord Ribbles- dale, the subject of the famous Sargent portrait. Laura died in childbirth, an adored member of the Souls. Margot, after dallying with Alfred Milner in Egypt, became the wife of Mr Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister.
With Sir Charles's children, romance entered the Tennant family. As a feeling, it tends to need leisure and comfort in which to flourish and the Tennants were now immensely rich. Sir Charles's oldest son married Pamela Wyndham, a society beau- ty once wooed by the celebrated seducer Harry Cust. Pamela took romance to the point of absurdity. She isolated herself in a rustic idyll at Wilsford, a house she had built in Wiltshire to reflect the fashionable simplicity of the Arts and Crafts move- ment, suffocating her children with a sug- ary affection that Was little more than an extension of her own narcissism.
Did the effete Wyndhams drag down the robust Tennants? I think not but, being a Wyndham, I may be biased. Certainly Pamela spoke constantly to her children of their 'wonderful Wyndham blood', no doubt putting a suitably romantic gloss on that long saga of advantageous marriages, illegitimacy, over-eating and tireless pur- suit of the fox. But the Tennants seem to me to have been essentially shaped by their times, for in the early years of this century many of the aristocracy, under threat from radicalism and change, turned towards the past for inspiration, also to a selfconscious quest for beauty and interest in the arts. The coming of the Twenties added a facile smartness, partly the result of the new mechanical age and a determination to seek pleasure after the horrors of the Great War. The Tennants could claim to span two worlds, the old and the new. After the death of her Tennant husband, Pamela married Lord Grey of Falloden who had been Foreign Secretary in 1914. Her beautiful Tennant children, however, were launched as young adults into the Jazz Age. David and Clare caught the brittle atmosphere of those years, he running the Gargoyle nightclub, she embarking upon a life of flirtation and self-regard which ended with a somewhat clumsy attempt to seduce General 'Monkey' Morgan on the Palladian bridge at Wilton. Christopher, always more stable, steered the family business towards a profitable merger. At Wilsford, Stephen painted and wrote in a style of unashamed aestheticism that won admirers as varied as E.M. Forster, Willa Cather, Siegfried Sassoon and Rex Whist- ler.
It was Simon Blow who introduced me to Stephen Tennant. One evening, as we sat on the velvet chairs at Wilsford, the overgrown garden darkening the low win- dows of the house, I thought the scene worthy of Huysmans' Des Esseintes. The great industrial fortune had led to fantasy, the bleach had evolved into the roses and sea shells of an aesthete's dream. A record of the American musical Oklahoma played softly in the background. 'That soprano, Max. . . have you ever heard a more beautiful voice?', Stephen murmured. The three of us — Simon, Stephen and I — were caught in a moment of curious rapture perhaps not far removed from Lord Glenconner's imagined golden trans- formation on the motorway, a vision as complete as those early Tennants' plans for the great factories at St Rollox. The author of this book, himself a Tennant, has charted with great skill the journey from the inhospitable land of 18th-century Ayr- shire to last year's Caribbean party and that Wiltshire house of fugitive enchant- ments, now up for sale.
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